Demand for a highly-integrated transceiver solution has increased greatly in the wireless infrastructure market in response to improvements in technology performance. Historically, infrastructure transceivers employed lower levels of on-chip integration than handset transceivers in order to achieve the higher performance requirements of infrastructure systems. One of the main limiting components preventing on-chip integration is the Local Oscillator (LO) source, which is typically a Voltage Controlled Oscillator (VCO). The phase noise performance of the LO is one of the most critical metrics in an infrastructure transceiver. For many applications, the only possible solution to achieve the required noise specifications is to utilize an off-chip, discrete component VCO or entire Phase-Locked Loop (PLL) module. Despite efforts to develop a fully-integrated infrastructure transceiver, an integrated VCO with overall performance approaching that of high-performance discrete component modules has not yet been achieved.
Accordingly, there is a need to develop an integrated infrastructure VCO in order to reduce the cost and space required to implement an infrastructure transceiver.